25 Years of the Web

Today, we mark 25 years of the web. This is of particular importance to Magma Digital, as the Computer Scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation has enabled us to build web applications for customers for many years now, to that improve their processes and efficiency.

When the British computer scientist initially submitted his proposal paper for the web on 12 March 1989 his boss at the time remarked that the idea was “vague but exciting.” Amazingly, his colleagues at the Swiss physics laboratory CERN, initially completely ignored the proposal.

Fast forward 25 years of the web and looking back, the title for the paper, “Information Management: A Proposal”, was a perhaps a little underwhelming when you consider just how much the internet has changed our lives and business. The web took just over four years to reach over 50 million users, whereas it took radio 38 years and television13 years.

Sir Tim’s Initial Diagram Explaining the Concept of the Web

25 years of the web

Sir Tim was looking for a way to use the internet to improve communications within the CERN complex. Nowadays, we associate CERN with the well-known Large Hadron Collider Project, but it is interesting to note that this was also the birth place of the web where it all began coming together.

It is important to mention here the difference between the internet and the web, as the two are often conflated. The internet is the infrastructure on which the web runs and arrived decades beforehand.

The internet, connecting networks of computers together, was already in place in universities and research facilities like CERN. However, Sir Tim’s concept of the web was crucially different in that it allowed computers to communicate directly with each other without any human input.

Magma Digital was created approximately 10 years after the inception of the web. Just like the modern day giants e.g. Google and Facebook, Magma definitely would not be here without it! So after 25 years of the web and with constant changes still occurring, it is exciting to think where the web will be in another 25 years from now!

Want to know more about the work we do with the web and what it can do for your business? Call our team on 0845 241 6460 or email info@magmadigital.co.uk